Penumbral Zone

Exhibition Dates
Private View
Thursday 7th April

Show
Friday 8th April – Monday 14th April
2022

Abdollah Nafisi
Abdollah Nafisi is an Iranian artist based in Sussex, UK working with organic materials to create improvised sculptures. With a background in carpentry and art, Abdollah uses locally sourced wood as his primary material, viewing the wood as a time machine. On this basis of objecthood, he examines issues of heritage and temporality with elements such as fire and metal. During his travels with nomads and tribes of Iran, learning mystical Sufi music,  playfulness became the door to capturing the spirit of nature. An important part of his work to this date, is exploring tensions between contrasting themes such as spirituality and playfulness.

 

Anna Blom
Anna Blom is a Swedish born, London based artist currently completing an Master in Painting at the Royal College of Art. She holds a First Class Bachelor of Fine Art Painting from UAL Wimbledon College of Arts (2020) and has curated, led and participated in a number of group exhibitions and independent solo installations in the UK, such as 24 Cork Street and Copeland Gallery. Anna divides her practice between south London studio and Stockholm, where she works in an interdisciplinary manner combining painting, drawing, sound, words and found objects, in arrangements of a continuous narrative in a diaristic archival methodology.

 

Doireann Gillan
Doireann Gillan hails from Dublin, Ireland. Prior to joining the Royal College of Art, Doireann completed a graduate diploma in fine art at Chelsea College of Art, London.
Doireann’s practice is concerned with the experience of inhabiting the body, in particular, the binds women face when asserting themselves in a patriarchal society. It finds expression predominantly in sculptural forms, though more recently, it has expanded to include a video and performative lens.
Previously, Doireann was a producer and worked with a range of international artists, performers and political world leaders from Martin Creed, Ellie Goulding, Bill Clinton to Syria’s national orchestra.

 

Edward Rollit
Edward has always been surrounded by old things. Antique furniture restoration was what he grew up around; the wonderful smell of wax, polish and the feeling of supple old wood. He then studied Art history for his BA. In amongst his studies, he worked for fashion and furniture designers, interior stylists, galleries and photographers. These experiences have given him an insight into a multitude of industries and outlooks. They have all influenced my work in different ways; the theatre of fashion, the way a photographer sculpts and deceives the eye with light, the sensibility of form that a piece of furniture must adopt, to be both elegant and functional and the nuanced alterations of colour that an interior stylist must tweak to gain the perfect balance.

 

Josephine Alberthe Molter
In an attempt of reclaiming and rediscovering myself and my body in an uncompromising manner, Josephine aims to create an intimate encounter through the process of her practice. The physical nature and how the body relates to place, the earth and existence is in general themes she explores. In utilising slow and meticulous processes, her approach is habitually sensuous and fragmented and is often connected to rituals, ecology, identity and memories.
“Suppose I have to say that I love words and puzzles and word-puzzles and inverted meanings meaning inverted”

 

Marita Pappa
Born in 1988 in Athens, Greece, Marita Pappa lives and works in London. Her sculpture and installation work address the intimate in the political and the ambiguous terrain between private and public, aesthetics and politics. She is particularly interested in how forms and found objects carry personal and political significance, and how they navigate through history, language, and civic duty. She employs a variety of media, often arranging works together to create larger installations. Her practice explores unhealed wounds and vulnerabilities in an effort to call our attention between the spaces we share and personal experience as well as the transformative processes that take place in between.

 

Mary Pedicini
Mary Pedicini is an American sculptor based in London. She received her BA in Studio Art from Dartmouth College in 2019, and is currently an MA candidate at the Royal College of Art in London. Her work has been exhibited in group shows at the Freud Museum in London, the Merz Gallery in Sanquhar, Scotland, and Abigail Ogilvy in Boston, among others. Her solo shows include Dartmouth’s Barrows Rotunda in Hanover, NH, and Shelter in Place Gallery in Boston.

Her work often takes inspiration from science. She lifts from her study of ecology in undergrad as well as further independent research for her masters dissertation, considering the history/philosophy of science, and the ethics and possibilities of thinking at expanded timescales. Her research currently focuses on the role of art in preserving legacy, particularly at the scale of deep time.
Mary values subtlety in her material choices, often emphasizing the wear and stain of time in found objects. Wax, wood, and stone are common in her practice. She plays with hiding and revealing objects and images, making it clear that there is something there, something hidden – an open secret, a known unknown.

 

Matvei Matveev
Matvei Matveev creates works that explore a political language of bondage and fetishism. His imagery speaks of masking, domination and abuse that he aligns with the current politics in his country of birth–Russia. Relying on the context of the work and the politics underpinning it, he playfully argues through a pop-art direct style of image-making. As a multidisciplinary artist, Matvei engages with experimental practices and materials to create work ranging from Painting to 3D objects.

 

Mila Morelli
Mila’s body of work is varied and spans different techniques, influenced by a dialogue and synergy between the different facets of her practice; from fabric to paint, found objects, film, fashion photography, performance, and theatre. Milas art is a continuous exploration of everyday moments and how characteristics of materials encountered may infuse and spark unexpected conversations. Some reoccurring themes explored in her work are; memory, nostalgia and philosophical enquiry, often disrupting familiar, habitual perceptions of nature-culture binaries, mortality and the unconscious, sexuality and the body.
Milas interest in childhood rhetoric’s and notions of play in relation to art stems from investigations into how bodies, objects and environments are performing in the world; challenging relationships between artefact and artifice, authentic and fake, as well as playing with notions scale. The act of casting a new gaze onto an object, be it that of a child, or a traveller or triggered by a change of proportions is central to her practice.

 

Lara Girling
Lara’s experience of living in different cultures and access to foreign languages has enriched her understanding of the world and introduced her to different forms of dance and theatre which have served to inspire her creativity and desire to explore the world of performance.
Lara’s world-view can be defined by the concept that life is most full and fecund when the imagination is given the freedom and scope to express one’s personal interpretation of a world lived as art and to convey a vision of shared experience and collective inspiration by connecting cultures and communities through dance and stage performance. Via the mediums of dance and physical theatre, Lara explores different expressive forms as ways of connecting and communicating.

 

Pia Ortuno
Pía Ortuño (b. 1996 San José) is a Costa Rican artist currently living and working in London. She graduated from the University of Costa Rica with a BA in fine arts (2019) and later moved to Pietrasanta, Italy to work and learn ancient marble and bronze techniques. She apprenticed under Jimenez Deredia in his Carrara studio and worked at the Fonderia Artistic Mariani (2020). Currently attending the Royal College of Art, Ortuño is pursuing her Masters’ degree in painting and is the Co-founder of Sala Salon (2020).

Ortuño’s practice is concerned with finding, collecting, describing, unearthing, exposing, and revealing different types of time.  Ortuño understands time as an infinite fabric- spiraling layers of temporality. Experimentation with materiality is a critical element in her practice. It is this research-based approach which reveals pockets of different types of time to Ortuño, allowing her to then manipulate these excavated moments into the present, re-freezing by displaying them, and fixing these moments temporarily in the present

 

Rachel Bungey
After working in the music industry for five years, Rachel moved to Tokyo to start a design studio (Mantis Studio) with a goal to fund her art practice. She has worked as a creative / art director in the music industry for seven years. Working in-house for XL Recordings and as a freelancer, she has worked on many musicians’ global album campaigns. Rachel is now a full-time student at the RCA, Sculpture MA programme. Her work explores questions around new technologies, abstraction, perception and environmentalism. With a focus on form and balance, Rachel explores sculpting as a form of meditation. Exploring these ideas through the physical and digital realm, using new technologies such as 3D printing, VR, 3D sculpting. Rachel is currently working towards a project that will use a six axis robot arm, as well as experimenting with more traditional sculpting techniques.

 

Yue Yin
Yue Yin (b.1997, Jilin, China) is an artist who is currently based in London. He utilizes different art forms to visualize his point of view on multicultural phenomena. During his international journey, he uses such experience to relate his research on the idea of vulnerability. He has also been involved in the execution of many commissioned large-scale public art projects in various cities in China. Yin is a member of the China Sculpture Institute. He has participated in multiple institutional exhibitions, including
Laozi Plaza, Suzhou (2020)
Sullivan Gallery, Chicago (2020)
China Sculpture Museum, Datong (2018)
Galerija Nevesinje, Nevesinje (2018)
His works have been permanently collected by the Printmedia Department of School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Wuhan Overseas Chinese City, Art Jahorina, etc.